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Many of the most famous Swedish films from the silent era, directed by the pivotal figures Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller during the so called Golden Age said to have lasted 1917-24, were screened in Paris in 2016 during the Toute la mémoire du monde festival, with several of the sessions taking place at the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé. Therefore, the focus of the Swedish silent films selected for this Carte blanche is films by lesser known directors from the period, including films from the latter half of the 1920’s which often have been unjustly neglected.

The most prolific director of the later period was Gustaf Molander, who had a successful career that lasted well into the 1960’s. His Ingmarsarvet (1925) is a film which is reminiscent of the classic films by Sjöström and Stiller, being a big-budget adaptation of a famous literary work and shot on location showing the characters’ inter-action with nature. Molander’s 1928 Synd / Sin is Swedish-UK-Germany co-production set in Paris, and an example of the international trend that was prevailing towards the end of the 1920’s, with foreign stars Elissa Landi and Gina Manès in the cast.

Another director with a successful career in sound film was Alf Sjöberg, (winning the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1951 with his Strindberg adaption Fröken Julie / Miss Julie). His directorial debut was the visually striking Den Starkaste / ‘The Strongest’ (1929), with spectacular on-location footage depicting a seal-hunting expedition in the Arctic Sea. Director Per Lindberg’s first love was the theatre, but he made two silent films, the only to survive being the remarkably modern Norrtullsligan / “The Norrtull Gang" (1923), a delightful comedy and social drama of four city female office-workers trying to get by in a man’s world. The most original – and most expensive – of all Swedish silent films was Häxan / Witchcraft Through the Ages (1920), made by Danish director Benjamin Christensen. This mixture of didactic lecture, essay film and suggestive depictions of medieval conceptions of witchcraft and the devil was almost two years in pre-production, and an entire studio was especially bought for the production and put at Christensen’s disposal.

Almost all original negatives to the Swedish silent fiction films were lost in a devastating fire in September 1941. The preservation work carried out by the Swedish Film Institute since the 1960’s has therefore almost exclusively relied on more or less worn nitrate projection prints as the source elements. One exception is one of the earliest feature-length fiction films made in Sweden, I lifvets vår / Au printemps de la vie (1912). The film was produced by the Pathé frères filiale in Stockholm, and the negative was therefore kept in France, where it was rediscovered in the collections of the Cinémathèque française in 2004. Even though many films were lost due to the fire, prints of films thought to be lost still resurface and are identified in the collections of colleague archives outside Sweden. Fragments of Stiller’s Balettprimadonnan / Wolo Czawienko (1916) were found in Zaragoza and at the Filmoteca Española in Madrid in recent years. And in 2017, the CNC in Bois d’Arcy discovered an almost complete nitrate print of Victor Sjöström’s Judaspengar / L’Argent de Judas (1915), which was recently restored by the CNC in collaboration with the Swedish Film Institute, and which is now having its French première.

The collections of the Swedish Film Institute also include non-domestic films released in Sweden, and we have in the last years preserved a substantial number of nitrate prints of international films from the very early years. Apart from being unique, these prints also give us valuable clues to understanding Swedish pre-censorship distribution. Many of our early films are French, and included in this Carte blanche are two programmes of 13 unique Pathé shorts from 1903 to 1912, all of them recently preserved at our own in-house photochemical laboratory, from black-and-white, tinted and stencil-coloured prints.

I am very grateful for having been invited by the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé to present our collections and to showcase some recent work carried out in our in-house analogue and digital laboratories. I’m also happy to present a programme with shorts featuring Greta Garbo, which includes rarely seen advertising films, fragments, news-reels and screen tests.